The following web exhibition accompanies the current exhibition by the
Deutsches Plakat Museum at the Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany. Text and pictures were kindly provided by
Rene Grohnert, director of the museum and curator of the exhibition.

27 January to 25 March 2007
Press conference: 26 January 2007 at 11am
Opening: 26 January 2007 at 7pm

The exhibition is exclusively compiled from the
collection of the German Poster Museum, which comprises some 340,000 works. A
selection of 288 exhibits, some of which are very rare, document the development of
German posters and their forerunners in a European context between 1721 and
1939. Some of these works will be exhibited publicly for the first time.

Hartwig Fischer, the Director of the Museum Folkwang said: "The German
Poster Museum owns the largest poster collection in Europe and in its breadth and
quality is one of the most important in Germany. We are delighted that within
the Museum Folkwang a suitable forum has finally been found for the German
Poster Museum, which also ensures the collection’s future."
Rene Grohnert, the Director of the German Poster Museum emphasised: "The
focus of the presentation is not on the individual poster but on documentation
of the genre’s crucial lines of development during the specified time period.
The exhibition offers the public an extensive overview of the dynamic
development of the poster."

The exhibition is divided into five large sections:

I. Forerunners and Early Posters
This section documents in three groups the early days of the poster. Ances
tors of the poster (leaflets, notices etc.) are shown along with prints
(illustrations, caricatures etc.), which reflect the use of the new medium in the
street environment. The first large-format and coloured sheets (primarily for
indoor use) complete this section.

II. Initial Highlights in the Development of the Poster
France around 1900, posters by Jules Cheret and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
amongst others form the first highlight in the development of the poster. The
influence on Germany and other countries was enormous, as examples from Great
Britain, the USA, Belgium and Italy prove.

III. German Posters in the Pre-War Era
Considerably influenced by French, English and Belgian posters, the German
poster at first began to develop differently according to place. Examples from
the turn of the century (19th/20th century) from Hamburg, Dresden, Leipzig,
Krefeld, Duesseldorf and Darmstadt provide an overview. Mainly in Munich and
especially in Berlin an independent and innovative development of the poster
took place from around 1905. This development in turn influenced France and
especially the USA.

IV. Posters in World War I
The posters of the then opposing countries show considerable differences in
tackling the task of canvassing support for the war as well as easing the way
of its socially intolerable consequences. Examples from Germany,
Austria/Hungary, France, England, Italy and the USA show a cross section of the new
poster imagery, which continued after World War I by transforming into political
posters.

V. A New Diversity. Posters from the 1920s and 1930s
The development of the poster is characterised by the almost simultaneous
appearance of opposing visual concepts of development. By using an expressive
imagery posters from the immediate post-war period formulate the new genre of
the political poster. The same applies in culture, especially film.
Bauhaus-influenced design, the "New Typography", the increased use of photography and
photomontage and the spreading of new printing techniques (offset printing)
generated a new type of poster. Simultaneously developments continued in the
areas of Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) and ornamentation. A final view
is of the following period, documenting posters from the year 1932 and
already auguring the coming era of great historical catastrophes in Europe.

In 2010 the collection of the German Poster Museum Essen, which comprises
some 340,000 works, will get its own exhibition space in the then completed new
extension to the Museum Folkwang. The exhibition in the Museum Folkwang,
which begins on 27 January 2007, is a foretaste of a groundbreaking new
presentation of the collection of the German Poster Museum in one of the major venues
in the Ruhr area.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue with contributions by Bernhard
Denscher, Juergen Doering, Rene Grohnert, Lars Herzog-Wodtke, Anita Kuehnel,
Hellmut Rademacher, Bettina Richter and Dieter Vorsteher, published by
Hermann-Schmidt-Verlag, Mainz, at a price of € 29,80 (museum edition).